First-Lindsay Lohan
Ok, good for working out to.
Nothing more.
Really.
]]>It’s sort of ironic that while my career is on it’s way up, professional athletes my age are retiring. Patrick Ewing graduated a year after I did but has retired.
In college they said it was likely that my generation would be one where over the course of our working lives we would probably have several careers.
Personally, I retired from the career of not knowing what I wanted to do with my life in my late twenties. Fortunately in my current career being 43 or 44 does not make one ready to be put out to pasture. It’s only when your brain starts to decline is it suggested that your time is past. Of course, that could happen at 43 or 44 but so far so good.
]]>The main landmark of the skyline from the train tracks was, of course, the World Trade Center. I’m not sure I ever referred to the buildings as the Twin Towers, although now it is common to do so. In my mind, it was the World Trade Center, those buildings that had risen when I was growing up. The buildings where once my junior high friends and I went up the top floor and then out to the roof, back when they still let you do that.
After I bought my first car and got a dog, I started driving to NYC whenever I went to visit my family. There’s also a moment on the highway where the City comes into view. It’s more noticeable at night when the lights of the City are so visible.
On this trip, I decided to note the mile marker on the Turnpike where the City first came into view. It seems harder to spot the City now that the WTC is gone. In fact, I have a hard time picturing the exact location of the two buildings. Nevertheless, at mile marker 96, the New York City skyline appeared. My home town.
]]>One of the symptoms of liver damage is poor appetite. Maeve never has a poor appetite, she’s always happy to eat my socks for example, even on a full stomach. But when you find out your dog is sick then the stakes become higher around food.
Last night we went to dog happy hour (dogs play, humans get happy) and then to our friend’s house for dinner. Maeve is usually a handful at these type of events since she can easily place her head on a dinner table and is happy to help herself to whatever is being served. And if the counter tops in the kitchen are just a little bit higher, why it’s just no problem to stand up and serve herself (this is called counter-surfing in the world of Rhodesian Ridgebacks). Maeve is a pro.
She had refused to eat her regular dog food before going to happy hour. After the dinner party we returned home and with some coaxing, finally ate her food. Revealing that her appetite is fine, she just would prefer the chicken, asparagus, potatoes, and salad that the humans were eating.
This morning she was presented with the usual dog food offerings. She turned her nose up at it. I always have a twinge of worry, is this it? Is she not feeling well and that’s why she won’t eat it? After two hours of her hounding me about my food and then sulking on the couch (her not me) I finally broke down and gave her one of the new dog cookies I bought yesterday. Of course, that is what she wanted.
My goal was to give her a cookie after she ate her food so that she would learn that eating her food would lead to the reward.
I put a few cookies in with her food. She ate the cookies and then ate her food.
She won.
And then went into the living room and did a little victory dance.
I kid you not.
]]>She has t-cell lymphoma which does not have as good a prognosis as b-cell lymphoma (the more common type) but her immediate response to treatment was remission which usually predicts a better life expectancy (not a cure but at least buying a couple of more years).
But if the lymphoma was in her liver then it would mean that her remission was over. The formula is that the length of the first remission predicts that the length of the next remission will be half of the first remission. Any attempt at inducing remission again would only give her about another month or so.
I opted for the biopsy to determine what was going on. At the same time started preparing myself for the fact that this was it. I wasn’t inclined to put her through more chemo just to get another month. Even though I was very upset, I consoled myself with the thought that without chemo she would have died within a few weeks of diagnosis but chemo had given me a few more months.
You have to measure these things in terms of months when you’re dealing with cancer.
However, the biopsy did not reveal more lymphoma. The best guess is that one of the chemo drugs was toxic to her liver and caused damage. It could be another type of cancer but that seemed less likely. Damage to the liver is still a serious concern and could prove fatal as well. They put her on SAMe which is a holistic treatment which I thought was cool that they were open to that approach.
When I picked her up she was ready to leave, as she always is. She seemed her usual feisty self, even with the liver problems. When we got to the floor we live on she took the leash from me as she usually does and walked herself home.
Maeve has a history of surviving usually fatal events.
As a one year old she helped herself to another dog’s bottle of chewable sedatives. Her stomach was pumped but the pills were already digested. She was fine.
As a four year old, she ate a bottle of chewable pills for incontinence. 3000 mg to be exact. They didn’t expect her to make it through the night. She did. She had some complications and when we called the ASPCA Poison Control center to find out if the complications were typical, their response was that they didn’t have on record any dog surviving a 3000 mg overdose so they couldn’t tell us what would happen. She recovered. I was told to expect that there would be significant kidney damage from the overdose. There was not.
As we left the animal hospital last night, I turned to Maeve and said, “Guess you’re not going to go down without a fight are you?” Her response was to leap into the car to get back to the business of taking charge of her life.
]]>My feeling that the Administration is vindictive has been vindicated.
]]>(I’ve been watching HBO’s new series Big Love recently and have to say that the founder of E-Harmony reminds me of someone who would feel very comfortable in LDS dominated Utah).
So I got back on e-harmony and put myself back in the system so I could be “matched.” I should add that when I tried the service a couple of years ago (you know that your singleness is definitely an issue when your mother calls up you up an encourages you to try an internet dating site she heard about on tv) I was matched with a bunch of guys who worked for the defense department (read: Pentagon) and were all about supporting the American way of freedom and liberty (for anyone white and American-born).
At the time I thought, oh well, that’s fifty dollars down the drain-but certainly good for a few laughs when I’m feeling amused about the concept of spending money on matches with conservative military men.
So, that brings me to this past weekend when I let E-harmony match me again. And this is what I got:
One man whose hero is: Donald Rumsfield
One man who: wants a woman who keeps her body in good running condition (that’s either like a car or a euphemism for ‘those with cellulite need not apply’)
One man who revealed something only his closest friends know which is: how hard it was for him to buy his condo.
Potential for harmony?
Not.
]]>So in one store I was stuck in line behind a woman who seemed to have some personal relationship with the salesclerk and they were bemoaning the state of employment. But the best encounter was in a housewares store where a woman at the checkout counter started yelling at the manager that it wasn’t ok to treat people a certain way. “We’re human beings you know!” she shouted and then turned to the young boy with her and said, “blublublubidyblub.” At first I thought she was being silly with the young child-but then she kept doing it. And then I started thinking, hmmm, tourette’s disorder? And then it really started to irritate me.
And in fact, I wanted to ask her what the hell her problem was and for the love of god would she please stop making that noise “blublublubidyblub.” In fact, it was just downright creepy. She stood outside the store and kept saying, “It’s no way to treat a person, blublublubidyblub.” She must have emitted that noise about ten times. The only good part was that the child with her seemed unperturbed by the blublublubidyblub-ing.
Of course, this is how a high tolerance for craziness is indoctrinated in the young and twenty-five years later, that kid will be looking for a quick shopping fix on a sunny Monday morning only to find himself a prisoner of a busman’s holiday.
]]>Four Jobs You’ve Had
Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over
Four Places You’ve Lived
Four TV Shows You Love to Watch
Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation
Four Blogs You Visit Daily
Four of Your Favorite Foods
Four Places You’d Rather Be
Four Albums You Cannot Live Without
Four Vehicles You’ve Owned
Tag-back to x-pollen
]]>However, I was curious to see if they went back and removed the image from the opening montage broadcast pre-9/11 and sure enough, they did not. So in some ways it’s authentic to the actual broadcast and in other ways a bit of a shock to see the World Trade Center when it was just one piece in the expansive New York City skyline.
In one of Harlan Coben’s novels, his protagonist comments while driving along the NJ Turnpike that when he looks over at the New York skyline, he can’t exactly remember where the World Trade Center was and that bothers him.
I have the same experience.
Years and years of traveling up to NY from DC on the train and then on the Turnpike were always punctuated by that moment when I could look out the window and over the oil tanks in Secaucus see the edge of my home town. And the World Trade Center, which is how I always referred to it, was one of the first things I would see, then my eye wandering over to the Empire State Building, and then the Chrysler Building. After a bit I would also try and pick out the Citibank building. Though those latter three are still standing, it is strange and something to get used to to have that major change in the landscape.
]]>As a kid riding the NYC subway system, there used to be an add for a secretarial school (ok now I’m really dating myself-secretarial school! what’s that?) written in shorthand. It said something along the lines of (I didn’t go to secretarial school, I graduate college so I don’t know secretarial shorthand) “if u cn rd ths” then something about how you could make good money being a secretary. Ok, ok the official term now is Administrative Assistant. But back in the day it was secretary. Or was that secretery? Hmm….
]]>Recognizing that it is quite rude and overly dominant of me to get impatient with careful or nonobservant drivers, I made a resolution last night that I would no longer lose my temper and invoke the name of the son of the Christian god in these circumstances. Today on my way to church, I found myself behind a driver of a Honda who was someone who seemed to think it necessary to slow down and hit the breaks even though the light was green. As I followed this person we soon came behind a white mini-van with out of state license tags who was performing the wandering-on-the-road maneuver. Of course, I was cutting it close timewise and as we came to the intersection where the light was still green, the mini-van came to a stop in the middle of the road blocking any chance of passing in time to make the light. And out came the lord’s name in a less than flattering manner, and was used to decry the competence of the other driver. On my way to church no less. Then suddenly I remembered my New Year’s resolution and thought, well, that didn’t take very long to completely blow. So it’s a good thing I made one or two other ones that have nothing to do with driving or patience. And in the meantime I’m going to try and figure out how to get less aggravated in general.
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